1st off been playing FTD for 4 days now and its a great little take off.

The problem I ran into is gold and leveling.. I find that items cost $$$ at vendors and the drop on gold is a joke. Best way to make $$$ is to bust open boxes and barrels, but they dont respawn. You have a limited amout of gold!???

But the bigger issuse is that im running a full 6 in my group, and with all members at lev 15. The problem is they share the exps for each kill and I have run out of mobs to kill. Im up to currently having to kill lev 23 to 26 mobs.. you can do it but battles are very long , almost boring. Tons of healing..
The bad guys can heal for big time numbers.. so you need dps to drop them.
Yes I went back and killed everything I could in the lev 16 to 19 area, but now there is nothing to kill.
Unlike most other rpg's, this game will not reset the bad guys for leveing. and or gold.
Not sure what to do.. Did I miss somthing?

Where are you at in the game? I'm just now going to the water mages for my second "initiation". My characters are all level 17, and the monsters are around level 20 that I'm fighting. Here are the things that I've found that help out:

1. Manage your inventory - Make sure you have the appropriate items on the appropriate people. For example, you'll want all the intellect boosting stuff on your magic users - for example, Victor, Loy and Telle should be heavy on magic.
2. Make sure you have some steampunk guys on your team. Machine guns and flamethrowers help out a lot. If you didn't pick up Torry, you need to go back and get him. Train up his Luck, Agility, and Perception, so all his little hits have a chance to double or triple. He'll become a killing machine.
3. Make sure you have some of the merchant perks on a player, and have that player talk to the shop owners (you can switch after talking and still get the discounts). You can drop the prices almost in half.
4. Make sure you have leveled up Telle's healing spells, and have her stand out of the way and heal people (she'll auto-heal anyone with less than 50% hitpoints if you click the button).
5. Tried and true tactics: When you're in a big fight, Kill the healers first, then the magic users. Kill the tanks last.
6. Do all of the quests that don't interfere with your moral alignment. I'm going for a good character, so I didn't do things like kill the professors for the angry nobels son (which worked out well, I was able to intimidate him and he paid me money to not turn him in).
7. You can spawn enemies as often as you want, if you need to level up. Go to a "dangerous" place, and press the sleep button. You'll wake up surrounded by bad guys.
8. Make sure you pay attention to the mana and health heal rates. Your tanks shoul have the health regeneration rate as high as possible. Same with mana rates for your magic users.
9. Don't be afraid to use "big ticket" spells, and quaff mana potions if needed. For example, Victor can wipe out low level enemies in one fireball hit, and knock down a lot off high level monsters, before the fight even starts.

For those who haven't picked this up yet:

There seems to be a good/evil thing going on in the game. All of the "still" pictures that act as cut scenes seem to have victor with either Telle or Loy. When they show victor with Telle, he is clean cut and nice, and when they show him with Loy, he has a goatee (a true indicator of evil, if I've ever seen one. <g>). So I'm kind of sticking to good routes.

The fights with the Water Mages you really need to use strategy. The reason is that they like casting these spells that obscure them in mist, and it seems to increase their healing rate also. If you don't manually target people, your guys will fight whoever they feel like (a sure route to disaster in high level fights). So You have to really watch who you're fighting and clicking on.

I'm still enjoying the game, and the story is still interesting. There are still a lot of side quests. Telle and Loy seem to have some sort of trouble between them, so be sure to pick her up, for some fun (you can't miss her, you basically have to tell her to get lost if you don't want her in your party).

There have been a few glitches - sometimes (very rare) people get stuck, but you can select them manually and get them going again. There have been a couple of translation errors, and one spell description is completely in Russian! But nothing that has distracted from the game so far. I still recommend it. I'll post more as I get farther.

edit: If you haven't turned on "Show Items" in the settings, you may be missing a ton of drops from combat. I make most of my money by selling bandit equipment.

Just got this to check it out. Was wondering what people's opinions were on recommended difficulty (i.e., normal or hard). Prefer a challenge (Playing Dragon Age on Hard (without mages btw)) but don't want to spend x+ hours and then find out I'm stuck to do unchangeable difficulty setting and/or wonky game balancing.

My point, I thought quite obviously, was not to brag. Frankly hard ain't that difficult for somebody who is familiar with this type of gameplay (mages or no). I was just trying to give an indication of the challenge level I am comfortable with and enjoy.

Can anyone speak to the difficulty level of Farewell to Dragons and how it plays.

My point, I thought quite obviously, was not to brag. Frankly hard ain't that difficult for somebody who is familiar with this type of gameplay (mages or no). I was just trying to give an indication of the challenge level I am comfortable with and enjoy.

There wasn't much sarcasm actually. A lot of people have been experiencing some frustration with DA, even on normal difficulty.

Originally Posted by JDR13
There wasn't much sarcasm actually. A lot of people have been experiencing some frustration with DA, even on normal difficulty.

I know which is frankly just silly. However, there are also those that complain that Nightmare is too easy, many of whom exploit the many somewhat imbalanced offensive mage spells by incorporating three offensive mages in the party.

Originally Posted by magerette
Just started playing this—thanks, Jaimi for all the tips and hints. I'm just starting the game, and I agree, 'action-rpg' is something of a misnomer, unless you consider Arcanum or BG an arpg.

I have taken such a long break now that I will need to restart again … which isn't necessarily a bad thing …

I skipped this game first when I read "dungeon siege" and "action-rpg" in the beginning but it seems its not really true.

I need to make a mental note to remember download this thing when I run out of other rpgs. Too bad they wont do a physical release.

I dont think I can handle another fall like this. Im so far overloaded with these fantasy rpgs I need to start dropping even the good ones soon to shorten the purchase-list. At this rate it will be hard to decide what to buy in future. Theres just too many interesting games out there.

— “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
"Those who dont read history are destined to repeat it."– Edmund Burke

@mike: yes, restarting is a plus in a lot of games. If not a necessity…

@zakhal: You might want to wait and see if they ever release a demo. I'm supposed to do a review of this, so I can't say much, but I will tell you the rtwp mechanic is very similar to Dungeon Siege style combat.

Yes, I agree, rune_74; it's similar to BG also, but as you say, the 3D camera and engine make it share the DS feel. I'm hoping I can get more adept at controlling the party members, as they do have a feature which allows you to turn off the AI script.

Originally Posted by magerette
@mike: yes, restarting is a plus in a lot of games. If not a necessity…

@zakhal: You might want to wait and see if they ever release a demo. I'm supposed to do a review of this, so I can't say much, but I will tell you the rtwp mechanic is very similar to Dungeon Siege style combat.

I guess I dont have to play this game then. Lazarus is the only dungeon siege game I could enjoy. Ill look forward to your review then.

— “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
"Those who dont read history are destined to repeat it."– Edmund Burke

I really can't say very much right now, but the longer I play, the less I'm reminded of DS, or any action rpg. You'll just have to wait a bit longer til I can spill the beans—it's not a short game by any means.